


About Ashes

by seasoflizards



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Fanganronpa, Gen, Original Character - Freeform, TW: Arson, TW: Domestic Abuse, TW: drinking, i don’t know how to tag, tw: death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 04:47:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16527656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seasoflizards/pseuds/seasoflizards
Summary: A fire, a mess, and finally, Hope’s peak. About Hikaru Hatsu, Ultimate Arsonist, and how he came to be.TW: Alcohol usage, Graphic abuse, Death, Arson and lots of Angst





	About Ashes

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t know how to tag for shet nor how to write, but Hikaru is for an upcoming fangan! Hope you love him as much as I do.

The reception room is quiet, per usual, in the late hours. In one corner, a woman with loosely tied ginger hair in a pastel pink cardigan fills out paperwork in silence. There’s a row of chairs with scratchy pastel blue cushions line up against the wall, mostly empty, save for a small girl with the same shade of ginger hair and eyes as the woman playing with an airplane toy in one of them.

The door flies open with a gust of wind. One of the chairs shakes and falls down, startling the woman and girl alike. A tall man stands front and center in the doorway, dark skies behind him, as a boy peeks out from behind the man. The receptionist’s heels click across the thin carpet, exiting the desk and stepping over to the man. 

The boy shivers. 

What happens next isn’t of a remarkable quality, but the boy hyper fixates his attention on the conversation that follows his abrupt entry, his boots still wet with muddy rainwater.

“How may I help you?” The woman says and cocks her head to one side. Her voice is peculiar and soft, matching the pink cardigan folded over her forearms.   
“Yeah. Uh. I found this kid all out on the street and he wouldn’t say sh- aw, pardon. Yer place looked like somewhere to uh, help with this stuff.” The gruff voice of the man comes next. He can smell the cigarettes looming off the man’s breath with each word he spits out.

“Sir, did you think to call the police?” Her voice is soft and gentle, laced with concern but no malicious intent. 

“Ah, ya see. There was a woman all up n’ passed out around the kid ‘ere. Didn’t wanna raise suspicion.” He seems impatient, gruff voice growing more scratchy and words coming faster.

“I can let him stay for the night, poor thing. I’ll contact authorities in the morning. Have a nice night, sir.” She leans down and pats the kid on his back while jutting forward another hand “Here’s our business card, if anything ever comes up.” 

The man takes the card and makes a swift exit, door slamming behind him as his heavy coat, dripping in rainwater hits the door.

And so, little Hikaru was alone again.

It was an odd story that landed him here. Some prying and warm soup had led the boy to open up, though, so this is how it had all come to be. To say Hikaru was odd was an understatement. He tripped over simple words but seemed to shoot out the most complicated, his voice was small and never seemed to raise itself except for a few awkward times, and he trembled all throughout the explanation. 

The woman passed out, was indeed his mother. They had been sleeping in wherever they could find, as long as it included a roof. The first few months of moving weren’t so bad. There was a friend of his mother’s, still living with her parents that snuck them into her basement and let them camp out on the basement couch with tons of blankets and soup deliveries twice a day. 

Of course, there were downsides to the basement as well. There were rats, but Hikaru had learned to make friends with them by feeding them breadcrumbs and teaching them tricks under his blanket. There were parties the friend threw, but Hikaru had learned to stand the smell of alcohol and his mother throwing up in the bathroom at 3 am only to wake up two hours later begging for ibuprofen. There was the windy draft that came almost every night, but Hikaru had learned to seal up the windows with duct tape and build tiny fires in the middle of the room with paper and various other scraps. But then there was the parents. Hikaru hadn’t learned to deal with them, and that’s how him and his mother had found themselves kicked out after he attempted stealing blackberries from the kitchen in broad daylight.

So they were on the street once again. His mother, a young woman with a frail frame and long, dark hair that swamped her and made her look younger than she already was looked helpless enough to be taken in by a man and his teenage son. They were kind to him and his mother, and kept them well fed as long as his mother made breakfast and helped around the house and with homework. She helped as much as she could, at least. She was too frail to do any heavy lifting and would pass out if she had inhaled more than a whiff of window cleaner, but a phenomenal cook. On multiple occasions, she helped with the teen’s homework. Although she had left school as soon as she had Hikaru, she certainly hadn't been a bad student, just a girl particularly bad luck and a popular boyfriend who refused to take accountability. Her kanji wasn't the best, but Hikaru had watched her explaining chemistry for hours.

Unfortunately, that too came to an end. Hikaru had been kept up all night by screaming and pitiful crying for nearly a week. One day while the man was at work and the son at school his mother dragged him out of the house with a suitcase and tasked him with raiding the fridge. She was silent on their way out, but the ugly purple bruises on her neck and upper arms told him everything as soon as they got on the bus.

The next few weeks were difficult. The two of them headed to a shelter for women and children where he managed to make a friend, but just two weeks after their arrival a rare and unusual form of the flu spread through the masses and many left, not wanting to contract the flu. Hikaru and his mother were one of many.

How long had it been since then? A year? More? Less? They had been on the street for almost a month now, his mother disappearing at night with a layer of bright lipstick and dark hair curled with too much hairspray only to return in the morning with smeared bubblegum pink all over her face and a headache that wouldn't go away. One morning, the headache refused to leave. His mother didn't leave that night, or the next, and refused all helpings of food or an extra blanket. He sat and brushed her hair for her and gave her water with shaky hands until one rainy day she just didn't get up. He waited until late at night until the last night bus dropped off a slouching business man he recognized as Mr. Tadashi came by to give him leftover noodles. She wasn't moving. She didn't move when he struck a fire in the nearby dumpster, or when he portioned the noodles. She wasn't breathing either.

Hikaru was in shock. His mother was frail but had managed to make it through all these years, and yet she couldn't make it through today. The rain came in heavy droplets, soaking her hair and his face. How long he hunched over her body to keep her from the heavy rain, he didn't know. Either way, he wasn't much help. Between the rain that dripped from his jacket onto her and the murky tears that dropped and disappeared into her hair, she probably got soaked anyway. A rustling had startled him. A tall, burly man with shaggy hair and a cigarette in his hand was coming toward them. When ensued next was a blur. He was being dragged away from his mother as another man checked her pulse and after trudging through flooded Tokyo streets he found himself face to face with a big glass door and then a woman in a cardigan.

So that was where he ended up. A kind woman who introduced him to her little daughter and gave him a bed in her office to sleep in for the night. He didn't sleep much, the clacking of her fingernails on the keyboard was mildly annoying but most of all he was longing for his mother. Was she alive? Where was she? He could only hope she held out just like she had all those times before. 

Morning came. He met three other boys, one a bit younger and timid like him, one very loud, and another who ate a ton. There were also girls at this odd new place, but they stuck up their noses, save for one, who was in her teens and acted as everyone’s older sister. No news of his mother, however, and so he thought less and less of her with each passing week. Not to say that he never thought of her, though, since he missed her like crazy and found himself stealing the girl’s dolls and braiding their hair before burning the dolls. It was an odd habit that the volunteers at the orphanage tried to stop, but he never truly did. The girls had gotten to a point where they decided he could just have any of their old dolls, or help style their new ones. Hikaru was growing up.

That’s when the news that he was leaving came. A young woman who owned a café was to adopt him in the coming spring. The next few weeks were mostly filled with paperwork and some arguing about odd policies. 

Spring rolled around, and sure enough he was swept into a car to meet his new family. The woman owned a cat, named Poki, who was bright orange and liked to claw at anyone with ankles that came near him, and had a fancy self draining bathtub. Narumi, he had learned to call her, gave him his last name. Hatsu. They lived in peace for a while. She taught him herself and allowed him to sit in the back of the cafe doing the work he needed to catch up on from all those years scrounging around. Life was good. 

Through all of this, something scratched at him. An urge to create something, anything. That something ended up being fire. It had helped him through many nights, that gleaming orange flame he had made with his own two hands. That was one thing he couldn’t lose, no matter where he went, since he could make a new one that gleamed just as bright. But he was also angry. Angry that it couldn’t save his mother, no matter how warm or how bright or how colorful the flame was. That was probably how he got caught behind an abandoned gas station with a bright green flame behind him and droplets of tears down his cheeks. Narumi didn’t scold him much, just looked at him with slight concern, knowing that he had struggles of his own, and fed him a sweet bun instead.

Then came Mr. Yamamoto. 

Mr. Yamamoto was a regular at the café Narumi dutifully ran. He was a busy man, normally coming in in the early mornings to order the same exact thing, a black coffee and a frog-shaped chocolate bread before facing his commute. Hikaru never saw much of him, but Narumi seemed fond of him and so he found that Mr. Yamamoto came more often and stayed for longer, and even became a sort of taste tester for Narumi’s interesting recipes. Not to say that that always went well, since the time Mr. Yamamoto came in at seven AM and left at eight AM because of Narumi’s new brew would forever be engraved in his mind. 

Hikaru even found himself looking forward to Mr. Yamamoto’s visits, even if Mr. Yamamoto barely acknowledged him.

It wasn’t much of a surprise when Narumi announced that she and Mr. Yamamoto were in a relationship after the fourth time Hikaru had been caught trying to light the stove ablaze.

So Mr.Yamamoto was a part of their lives now. He seemed to love Narumi, but not so much Hikaru. He wasn’t bad, per se, he just never really acknowledged Hikaru and smoked around the house, which Narumi discouraged. Frequent scolding from Narumi was common in the home for both of them, since Narumi was not particularly fond of the smell of smoke.

But one night, Hikaru found himself kept up by the smell of still-lit cigarettes and yelling. Typically, he would’ve been unphased, the smell of fire was no stranger and yelling was something he had heard all too much of. What kept him up we’re the contents of the words, laced with his name and the bitter adjectives used to describe him. Narumi’s gentle voice, cracking with tears as she defended him with her words as Mr. Yamamoto fired merciless insults on everything that was Hikaru. Narumi had went to bed that night crying, he could tell, while Mr. Yamamoto stormed out the front door.

He came back into the café the next morning, him and Narumi both looking unphased. Still, Hikaru noticed something odd in the air. Narumi wasn’t wearing her usual smile and her voice seemed scratchy, and Mr. Yamamoto sent a dirty glance of two at Hikaru as he ate and rubbed his forehead, complaining about wanting ibuprofen.

But there was worse to come. First it was a night or two a week the arguing would ensue, but never in his presence. Then one day Mr. Yamamoto came home and pressed his cigarette butt on the sofa, burning a hole in the soft green cushion and stomped to Narumi’s room. That was the first fight that happened during the day, and the fighting only got more frequent from there. It was only when Hikaru found himself caught in the middle that he had seen what was wrong.

Narumi had been crying, evident by her puffy eyes in the morning and red nose. Hikaru had stepped in the fights after, which had now increased in frequency to at least three times per week. Narumi went from puffy eyes to a bad migraine to freshly purple bruises on her arms to stealing and hiding Mr. Yamamoto’s copy of the apartment key in hopes he wouldn’t come back. 

He did. He made his way in one night after Narumi and Hikaru had long gone to bed and dragged Narumi out of bed, yelling at the top of his lungs about how she and her “pyromaniac cunt” of a son were dead to him. Hikaru could only cower behind the counter as Narumi’s soft blue hair was pulled and her glasses marred a gash on her cheek. This seemed to fall into a pattern that continued for months until Hikaru could take no more. He lunged at the man with anger, the back burner still on and Narumi curled up on the floor.

Mr. Yamamoto stormed out that night, and little Hikaru tucked Narumi into bed with a glass of water and placed Mr. Yamamoto’s new copy of the house key into a pan and set the stove on high. When the key had melted sufficiently, he cranked off the pan and poured the liquid into the backyard, inciting tiny sparks of orange that excited him, only for him to stomp them out by his foot. How many times had he been in the same situation before? Surely it had been years now.

But of course, Mr. Yamamoto came back. The café wasn’t in great condition, now run by a few helping hands in the form of Narumi’s relatives and friends as she and Hikaru boarded up the windows and hoped for safety. One day, on a gloomy afternoon when Narumi’s aunt was supposed to drop by with groceries for them, the opening of the door revealed quite the unwelcome visitor. Of course it had to be him. Four padlocks on the door hadn’t kept him out. Hikaru had let him in himself, without knowing that it was even him in the first place.

What ensued next was something that would leave a mark on Hikaru for the rest of his life. Literally. Loud crying, throwing of pictures and flipping of couches. A cigarette butt smashed onto the sofa again and glasses shattering on the tile. A woman crying, running and falling while Hikaru stood in front of her, guarding her despite his own trembling legs. A man, yelling and throwing and burning the couch and everything in his heart to an ugly black. A kid, sweeping up the aftermath as the woman rested and the man snarled at him by the dinner table. Then, the man too passed out.

There was burning. A tipped over trash can filled with bloody paper towels and glass set afire inside an apartment with three people inside it. Hikaru couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t watch this. So, he decided to end it. All rational thought seemed to slip from his mind as he collected the cigarette butts and dumped them into the growing flame. Amidst the bright orange, he saw a reflection of his own face. Hair from his mother, but eyes that had grown soft from Narumi and a fresh cut up his lip from, well, from recent events. He looked like a monster. He only seemed to realize this more as the fire engulfed a large part of the kitchen. There was no saving this now, and Narumi was probably overdosed on sleeping pills. She’d die by his own hands. How disgusting of him. He killed two of the women that raised him.

Suddenly the bastard passed out at the table didn’t matter to him. All that mattered was Narumi. His fire was going to be a murderer. But the smoke was too much. Even though he was proficient in this sort of stuff and could withstand smoke, his was too much. He collapsed on the ground, the tipped couch right before him, separating him and Narumi’s bedroom door. Guess he’d be dead, too. Well, it was his price to pay.

Hikaru woke up in a white bed with a tube in his arm and a room that smelt like chloroform. Everything sounded like it was underwater. One ear was ringing and too loud, and the other wasn’t picking up anything. He looked down, arms wrapped in bandages save for a small spot uncovered to insert the tube. Hikaru could already tell that the skin around it was burnt, evident by the married flesh that was barely visible. Ah, a nurse.

She rushed over, with a small smile on her face and big purple eyes. She had long pink hair that was tied in a singular fluffy ponytail down her back and choppy bangs under her hat. He wanted to touch her hair. Trying to lean up was apparently not the greatest idea. A sharp pain shot through his limbs, his face twisting in an odd grimace.  
“Take it easy, alright? I’ll talk with you for a bit if you need, and then we can bring you something to eat.” Her voice was gentle and concerned, big purple eyes looked down at him with the same aura.

Hikaru couldn’t reply. He didn’t know what to say. So, Narumi was probably dead. Of course he wasn’t. His mother had to die, Narumi had to die, even that scumbag Mr. Yamamoto has to die, but not him! He didn’t understand. How many times did he have to lose someone but not even die himself? He must have been a bad luck charm dipped in lighter fluid, he thought. The tube was the only thing that kept him down as he thrashed upward in anger and guilt toward virtually everything and let out a scratchy wail. The nurse helped him back down and tucked him in. She would explain later.

Two skin grafts from his stomach and a bunch of fluids and cosmetic surgery is what it took. Hikaru had functional looking arms and legs again. He also had a bald spot near the back of his hairline on his neck, which was an added bonus. A scar that ran through his lip gave him a permanent memory of his past, but that wasn’t nearly as bad as the long one that run up his cheek, almost touching his nose, that had been caused by hitting the burning couch. One ear was too loud, the other too quiet. He could live with that. It was the price he had to pay for ruining the lives, or rather taking the lives of those that raised him.

Nightmares, therapy, women in suit jackets and men with clipboards made the next few years a blur. Yet through all of this, the fire still burned. He made blue fire, which reminded him of Narumi’s hair and made him cry again. He got ashes, which were smeared all over his face. He lit a fireplace of his own and knew that his mother should have been there to scold him for not using the built in heater. Life went on. The fire is what gave him life, and as much as it had hurt him, it had also helped him.

Ultimate Arsonist was the name in master calligraphy given to him on the envelope sealed with Hope’s Peak’s stamp. He was no longer a kid trying to warm his mother or pyromaniac trash, he was an Ultimate. Still, he knew, he’d always be a murderer.


End file.
